Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

I confess I was slightly aghast by the Committee stage in the other place. MPs had tabled amendments to include much more explicit protections in the Bill as safeguards for individuals who might be vulnerable to coercion in all its forms and to more subtle interventions that could be characterised as encouragement. Amendment after amendment along these lines were rejected. I hope that this Committee will adopt a different approach and tighten up the drafting of the Bill precisely so that autonomy is meaningful and not just a slogan.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments to Clause 1 in this group. I speak in particular to Amendment 48 in my name. This seeks to strengthen the safeguards against someone being coerced into an assisted death by removing the words “by any other person” from Clause 1(2)(b). This would extend the notion of coercion by recognising that coercion or pressure can come from a multitude of places—an institution, a circumstance or another individual. I am sure there is agreement across your Lordships’ Committee that nobody should feel obliged to opt for an assisted death. This amendment aims to strengthen and clarify the eligibility criteria in the Bill in recognition that they are perhaps its most important safeguard.

I have deep concerns, as many of us do, about how we protect vulnerable people from unnecessary, unwanted death. I am especially anxious that we should be aware of the risk of coercion in all its forms, which is an issue that I raised during Second Reading. This includes somebody who feels coerced through a lack of real choice.

The National Audit Office’s recent report into the state of the palliative and end-of-life care sector is stark. As we know, funding is stretched and provision is disparate. As things stand, there is a lack of real choice for many people about the end of life. The knowledge of this could easily be internalised by people, leaving terminally ill patients in certain regions or who are part of particularly vulnerable marginalised populations feeling that they have no choice but assisted dying, whether or not another person is explicitly pushing this.

Therefore, my Amendment 48 seeks to ensure that such cases are not left out of the Bill’s definition of coercion. I ask my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, in his summing up, to give consideration to this, so that it remains possible to detect and prevent any death that the person has not freely chosen.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I do not like this Bill, but I am here, like many other Members of this House, to agree on amendments that will make this a better Bill, and I hope it will be effective.

When my father died, the family nanny, who had also been his housekeeper, needed somewhere to live, and my brothers and I paid for her to live in a very nice care home, where she was entirely happy, until I went to see her. On each occasion, she said to me, “I shouldn’t be alive. I ought to die. It is not right that you and your brothers are having to pay for me”. I have this direct knowledge. She was perfectly happy when I was not there and, of course, we continued to look after her until she died.

But the Bill, once it is passed, is absolutely certain to be enlarged in all sorts of ways, as happened with other Bills in other countries once they became law. There are various reasons why it would be a good thing to enlarge it. For example, it seems to me bitterly unfair that those with locked-in syndromes such as motor neurone disease would be extremely unlikely to benefit from the Bill in the last six months, because many—those I have known—have been unable to do anything themselves in the last six months. The word “encouragement” is absolutely crucial. It does not have to be coercion. It does not have to be abuse. It could be nice people listening to a loved one and realising that they are saying, “I ought to die”, and consequently saying, “Yes, why not?” That would be extremely unjust.